The invisible cost of violence

Trigger warning: the following article has references to suicide and murder. Please avoid reading if you feel distressed by the subjects.

In Bhagautipur, a village with no more than 40 houses in western Uttar Pradesh’s Farrukhabad district, the arrival of luxury four-wheelers along the narrow road has always signified the onset of election season. However, on August 28, when they came bearing emblems of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Samajwadi Party, it was not to secure the Jatav caste vote. It was because the deaths of two minor Dalit girls in the village, a couple of days earlier, had made it to the national media.

The cars bearing the BJP’s emblem — the lotus — lined up outside a shop-turned-office. The almost-closed shutter was thrown open, and men in Nehru jackets strode into the room. Along its newly plastered walls were photographs of India’s Constitution-maker Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the Buddha, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, and Lord Ram. Discomfort hung heavy in the air. Police officials, some in uniform, some in civvies, were seated alongside party workers.

The deaths of the girls had refreshed the public’s memory of 2014, when an eerily similar and equally distressing incident had occurred in Badaun, U.P. On August 27, the Internet was flooded with the juxtaposition of two photographs: one was a decade old, of two Dalit teenage cousins’ bodies hanging from a mango tree. The other, a couple of hours old, was of two teenagers hanging from two ends of the same dupatta, again, from a mango tree.

The Internet had forgotten that in 2022, another two teenage minor Dalit sisters had been gang-raped, murdered, and hung from a tree in Lakhimpur Kheri district.

In 2022, the National Crime Records Bureau report showed that U.P. had registered 1,430 crimes against girls in the 12 to 16 age group under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012. This was the third highest in the country, after Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. The same year, U.P. saw 15,368 cases being registered against Scheduled Castes (Dalits), the highest in the country. The State has been recording the highest number of such cases across the country since 2020.

A dark night

The girls’ bodies were first spotted by Brijesh, 27, who runs a cycle-tyre repair shop. At the crack of dawn, he had stepped out of his one-room house with a lota (mug) to relieve himself in the mango orchard, 300 metres away. In Bhagautipur, while most houses have an indoor bathroom, some still cannot afford one.

Used to being mocked for his limp, Brijesh’s sleepy eyes scanned the area for teens and young adults, many of whom would publicly bully him. Seeing none, he walked through the rain-soaked mud to the mango orchard. In the next few minutes, the village had been rudely shaken out of its slumber by the news of the girls’ deaths.

A middle-aged woman froze on hearing his screams. Her 15-year-old daughter and her 17-year-old friend had been missing since the night before. “Before I could even think, my neighbour rushed into the house, hugged me, and broke down, saying their bodies had been found in the mango orchard,” she said, wiping away tears.

The night before, the duo had gone to the temple, about 400 metres away, to watch the Janmashtami tableaux commemorating Krishna’s birth. One of their fathers, Raj (name changed to protect privacy), said, “They had stepped out in the evening, but came back home by 9 p.m. when it began to rain. But in half an hour, as soon as the rain subsided and they heard the sounds from the tableaux, they left for the temple.”

Around 12.30 a.m., as the temple sounds died down, his eyes watched the main entrance. He heard the faraway voices of people walking through the gali (lane), going home. Those gradually died down, but there was no sign of the two best friends. “As time went by, I got scared. We checked our neighbours’ houses and called relatives to ask if they had gone to their places, but no one knew anything,” Raj added.

A neighbour later said she had seen them in the temple in the evening, but was certain they weren’t there at night.

At 3 a.m., the two families decided to resume their search in the morning. Dawn brought on horrors they hadn’t imagined.

In the next couple of hours, kin from villages across western U.P. had reached the girls’ home to be with the families. They offered condolences, but also theories about what could have happened. Villagers and visitors went to the spot in groups to take pictures and play detective.

Police reaction

Unlike 2014 and 2022, the State police were prepared to put out the flames before the Opposition or the media could fan it. “Everything happened very quickly. They came, brought down the bodies, took them for post-mortem, and cremated them the next day,” the father said.

A senior officer at the Kayamgunj police station, under whose jurisdiction Farrukhabad falls, said there was a lot of pressure because of the sensitivity of the case. Forty-eight hours after the police had found the two bodies and even after they had been cremated, an FIR was not lodged, and no investigation had begun.

Section 194 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita states that the police can take cognisance of an alleged case of suicide and register an FIR if “there is any doubt regarding the cause of death”.

At the orchard, the police had left behind used gloves, plastics with U.P. police emblems, and packets of tobacco. YouTubers crowded around the tree shooting videos and broadcasting to followers. The tape cordoning off the area was torn.

Farrukhabad DM V.K. Singh and SP Alok Priyadarshi reach the spot where the bodies of the girls were found.
| Photo Credit:
ANI

Another officer said the team had found one mobile phone at the orchard and one SIM card on one of the girls. “The SIM card has not been sent for jhaanch (inquiry), but we got to know that the mobile phone belongs to a cousin, who had come to their house to charge his mobile phone,” he said.

Srikrishna Gautam, a local BJP worker, said unlike the Badaun case, this time the police had decided to choose an investigating officer from the same community, lest the public accuse them of having “savarna (upper caste) investigators trying to cover up a hate crime”.

In the next 24 hours, Superintendent of Police (SP) Alok Priyadarshi told the family and the media that the post-mortem report had stated that the death was due to ante-mortem asphyxia (death due to hanging) and the bodies bore no signs of sexual assault. The girls had taken their own lives, he said.

The families, which had seen the bodies, disagreed. They claimed there were marks of physical assault on the bodies and thorns in the hair. “How can two girls hang themselves with the same dupatta? If at all they did, how come the heavier girl was not hanging lower than the lighter one? This is murder. My daughter has been murdered,” the father of one of the girls said.

Amid theories floating in the air around Bhagautipur, on August 30, about 72 hours later, the police lodged an FIR and arrested two men: Pawan, 22, and Deepak, 23, from the village, for abetment to suicide. Deepak runs a tailoring shop in the area; Pawan is his friend and co-worker, the police said.

“One of the girls was going through a heartbreak since Deepak had started seeing another girl. They were also harassing the two girls, which must have been a trigger for them to take their lives,” said the SP. While the police proceeded to close the case, the families refused to believe the police’s version.

The past and the future

Badaun’s Katra Sadatgunj village, where the 2014 incident took place, is about 70 km from Bhagautipur. For the father of one of the victims, the eagerness of the law enforcement to close the case did not come as a surprise. “Ten years ago, too, the investigators were in a rush to close the case. To date, we do not know what happened to our daughters,” he said, standing near the mango orchard. The family lives just a few paces from here and is easily alerted to media presence.

The family still visits the court twice or thrice a year. “Every court hearing costs us at least ₹10,000, including the legal fee and transportation cost,” he said. Their contention is that three youth, all brothers living in the same village, had gang-raped and murdered the girls. However, the case was handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which submitted that the girls had killed themselves.

In the year of the deaths, the forensic science laboratory had submitted a report that stated there was no evidence of struggle prior to death, nor were there internal injuries. The report further noted that the girls were not sexually assaulted prior to death. The CBI had submitted before the court that one of the girls had been intimate with one of the men.

A decade after the tragedy, the family still has a rule. “Every woman is accompanied by a man when they leave the house,” said the father. While the young cousins had access to phones then, the girls growing up in the family now are no longer given devices. “After you lose two girls, you want to ensure that every girl in your family is safe,” adds the father of the other victim.

In Bhagautipur, 15-year-old Priya was part scared and part upset with what had happened to her peers. “Now, my parents will use this incident to not allow me to step outside and go to fairs,” she said.

Shilpa Phadke, one of the authors of the book Why Loiter?, said restricting women’s mobility post high-profile cases of violence against women is society’s knee-jerk reaction. “This is primarily why women don’t report sexual abuse, fearing a higher level of restricted movement and surveillance,” she said.

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